Apolitical Apathy

At what point do the apolitical, freethinking electorate and cultural movers and shakers of our time voice concern over the deluge of civil liberty breaches over common citizens?  Even John Cusack (no friend of the Right) publicly questioned the administration’s domestic drone policy.  (Strangely, no one has heard from him since.)  Certainly the Left’s political enemies are crying foul, calling for Congressional hearings and impeachment.

If the actions of the government align with a given ideology and supports the cause, it is agreed that the means and the ends are good.  The reciprocal being when government actions obstruct our ideology do we judge the actions as bad.

Whosoever is the keeper of the keys of power, having access to personal records for the purpose of leveraging surveilled information for the sake of intimidation should be met with concern of all.  Hence “turnkey tyranny”.

Will it take the DOJ ordering political enemies into community service, re-education workshops and seminars for the rest of the electorate to unify under the protection of civil liberties?  Or will it take the final step of shipping detractors off to Green Bay in the dead of winter?

Cries of what if fall upon deaf ears.  “What if” the Bush Administration had surveilled their political enemies, unleashed their attack dog IRS and gathered NSA phone records and PRISM data-mined social media communications for the purpose of intimidation?  Democrat supporters of the current administration believe the fallacy that the Bush administration most likely did the same thing and fall into the trap of moral equivalency as their civil liberties evaporate before their eyes.

In a classic example of doublethink, U.S. Intel Director, James Clapper, insists that PRISM is not a data mining system:  “It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

Linguistic gymnastics aside, when a government colludes with the vast majority of media, controls the majority of the population through domestic policy and surveils and intimidates the rest, you no longer live in a free society that is concerned with civil liberties.  No longer are we a society concerned with abuses of power that go unchecked.

Muffling, delegitimizing political dissenters, the age-old vilification of enemies – a necessity for any government who is fixated upon harnessing, sustaining and hoarding power.  For what purpose?  What has the left to gain by silencing dissent?  How does silencing a segment of the population differ from countless examples throughout history?

The argument that IRS audits and NSA surveillance under President Bush would warrant an apoplectic response from the left and incite rioting in the streets is merely hypothetical and the left cannot embrace the hypothetical.  Destroying the right fits in with the greater good.  The Right is the Left’s (and thus the world’s) ultimate enemy.  Not radical Islam.  Not terrorism.  All that ails the world is the Tea Party, George W. Bush and Sunday morning services–for they are the common enemy of those who embrace the ideology of social justice.

Evil is personified as all-things-Republican, Christian and Conservative.  It is they who are at fault for generations of malaise and poverty throughout the world.   The well-intended, destructive socio-economic policies of welfare state politics and destruction of family systems are never to blame.  Therefore targeting the right is not only met with silence but with giddied approval.

True champions of civil liberties, those election-cycle-coveted, free-thinking moderates and independents should shutter at any administration who breaches the rights of ordinary American citizens and political dissenters.  Yet only crickets can be heard.

Perhaps it is that there are many who disagree with the administration’s political aggression and lack of government restraint who are afraid to speak out and self censor themselves for fear of losing their reputation of being apolitical.